


you are my little kite

by tekuates



Series: my fist against eternity 'verse [3]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: M/M, Pining, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-28
Updated: 2015-01-28
Packaged: 2018-03-09 09:30:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,042
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3244640
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tekuates/pseuds/tekuates
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He stares at himself in the mirror. Dean used to be able to see himself, but now he just sees pieces; his crooked nose, his eyes, his mouth, twisted up. He can’t make the parts resolve into the whole. Not anymore.</p>
            </blockquote>





	you are my little kite

**Author's Note:**

> Betaed by the wonderful [alexisjane](alexisjane.livejournal.com)!
> 
> This is set during/before some of the events of [my fist against eternity](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1160504), so you may want to read that first (though it's not strictly necessary).
> 
> Comments are always lovely, and concrit is welcome!

It’s been a long drive and Dean is dog-tired, but when he checks into the motel – Super 8, going brand-name for once – he immediately changes into clean clothes and heads out on the case.

His first stop is a woman named Andrea Forletti, whose husband Antonio died a few days ago, found with a broken neck in the bathroom. The locked bathroom, which was probably the only reason he wasn’t talking to Andrea through the bars of a prison cell.

Dean tells her she’s a friend of Antonio’s from college, not a real close one, but he’d been passing through hoping to see good ol’ Tony, maybe meet the old lady while he was at it.

Andrea smiles at him, a small smile but a real one. “I’m sorry – Dean? I’m sorry, Dean. He, ah, he passed away. A few days ago, in fact.”

“Jesus, I’m sorry to hear that,” he tells her as sincerely as he can. “Do you, uh, do you want to talk about it? I know we don’t know each other, but if you need to work through what happened, just talk it out, I’d be happy to help.”

“Thanks,” she says. “Maybe I’ll do that.”

_The ring clatters into the sink, and Dean swears, picks it up, and puts on in the little shelf to his right. He can see his reflection in the side of it, swelled and distorted, and he looks away quickly, down at his hands. They’re shaking, again, and he stretches them out wide until his fingers curve back._

Andrea calls him the next night at around eleven.

“I’m sorry,” she says, her voice a little rough. “I just – I don’t really have anyone to talk to – that it wouldn’t just make it worse for them, you know?”

“You can say whatever you like,” Dean says. “I just want to help.”

“I just feel like _shit_ ,” she says. “I keep remembering – stupid things. Things that don’t matter. I don’t know.”

She gives a little gulping laugh.

“You know, the day before – no, a few days before – anyway, I was messing around –and he was teasing me, so I said, I said, ‘Antonio, I’m gonna break your neck one of these days,‘“ Andrea stops for a minute. Dean can hear her breathing hard. “I was just kidding,” she says. “I was just messing around, I didn’t _mean_ it.”

“Hey, hey, of course you didn’t,” Dean says, going for soothing. He’s never been much good at soothing, but he thinks he gets pretty close. “It’s not your fault, okay? These, these things happen. Nothing you coulda done.”

“Yeah,” she says, voice raw. “Thanks, Dean. For listening.”

“Anytime,” he says, and Andrea says, “Alright, bye,” and hangs up.

_He stares at himself in the mirror. Dean used to be able to see himself, but now he just sees pieces; his crooked nose, his eyes, his mouth, twisted up. He can’t make the parts resolve into the whole. Not anymore._

_He’s being absurd, he knows this. It’s been years, long enough for sense memory to fade. He shouldn’t expect to feel Sam’s arms wrap around him from behind, his lips brush Dean’s temple. Hell, the way Sam looked at him before he left, the things he said – well, Dean doesn’t know whether Sam’d even want to get that close to him again. He makes a frustrated sound and jerks his eyes away from the mirror._

What Andrea said gave Dean the insight he needed. She expressed a desire for Antonio to break his neck, and that’s just what happened. When Dean starts looking, he finds a bunch of similar instances; someone idly wishing for something, and then getting it – in one form or another. No pattern to it, though, which is probably why no other hunters took an interest.

Once he knows that, Dean just has to find out what specifically is causing the wishes to be granted. He unearths a security tape from the night of a bank robbery – a couple thousand went missing, no one ever found out who did it. It was deemed an internal problem, but Dean managed to get the story out of a spooked-looking teenager. Two grand had appeared in her closet the day after she had said to a friend, “Man, the things I could do if I had a couple of thousand!”

Dean slides the tape into the decrepit motel VCR, and fast-forwards until he sees some movement. He presses play. It’s short; a figure appears, picks up some stacks of money, and then walks out, right through walls and the front door. When it passes the front desk, Dean frowns and pauses the tape.

He dials Dad, lets the phone ring for a while, then hangs up. Dad doesn’t like it when he leaves messages, says it’s not secure. He’ll see the number and call back.

Dean calls Bobby next.

“Yeah,” says the gruff voice.

“Hey, Bobby, it’s Dean.”

“Hey there, kid. What can I do you for?”

“Just a little huntin’ help.” Dean digs through the scattered papers on the desk until he gets to the obit that put him on the trail. “I’m working this case, and it seems like something is granting wishes, kinda. It looks like it’s just hearing things people wish for offhand and givin’ whatever it is to them.”

“That’s not so unusual,” Bobby says. “Could be a whole bunch of things.”

Dean glances at the paused tape, the shape frozen in front of the front desk – the front desk with a mirror behind it. “It doesn’t have a reflection.”

Bobby makes a considering sound. “You’re right, that’s not usual, but I’ve heard of them. Stay on the line a minute, let me find what I got on them.”

“Sure,” Dean says. For a moment there’s just the sound of shifting and rustling paper.

“Okay,” Bobby says. “So this is a kind of – doppelganger, I guess you could say. It’s actually energy, summoned by using an object precious to the owner, and it’s tied to that person. It’s not really a _creature_ – couldn’t really even say it’s alive, which is why it ain’t got a reflection.

“Now, to get rid of it, you just gotta find that precious object and throw it in a fire. That’ll do the trick. One more thing, by the way it’s acting, granting multiple people’s wishes, I’d say the person who summoned it’s dead, and now it’s just “helping” , as it sees it.”

“Awesome,” Dean says. “Any idea how to find this person?”

“What do I look like, your research team?”

“Alrighty, thanks, Bobby,” Dean says, smiling, and snaps the phone shut.

_The water, when he turns it on, is unrelentingly cold, cold enough to make Dean’s fingertips ache as he rinses off the last of the soap. He dries his hands, hesitates, then slides the ring on. It’s looser than it used to be, he thinks._

_His hands are shaking worse than ever, so he heads out of the room, shrugging on his leather jacket, and goes out to the parking lot. It’s cold out, the early morning kind of cold that melts with the first touch of sunlight. Pretty soon Dean’s gonna be too hot in his jacket. He tilts his head back and lets the shallow sunlight fall on his face; he likes the way it feels, like it’s soaking into his skin._

Dad will still not answer the goddamn _phone_. Dean grits his teeth, feeling that pit in his stomach that says _something’s wrong_ , like that feeling you get when you lose your wallet, but about a thousand times worse. He shoves the phone back into his pocket, and shifts the shovel back to his right hand.

Bobby’s info made the case a piece of cake.  Dean just looked for deaths around when the first weird stuff had started happening. Sure enough, when he looked through the obits, he found some old guy whose dying words, apparently, had been that he wanted everyone in his town to achieve their goals. Doppelganger Butler had taken that as a request to grant everyone’s wishes. It was probably a good thing, though; with the thing’s power spread out like that, it didn’t have enough juice to do anything really crazy.

Dean opens the gate to the graveyard and slipped in. _There are bones beneath our feet_ , he thinks, as he always does in a graveyard. He thinks it might be a line from a book he read once, but he’s not sure. He might have made it up.

He’s not about to go rooting through a corpse’s pockets to find the “precious object” or whatever, but he figures that torching the grave will do the job just fine. With the added bonus of getting to light things on fire.

He’s pouring salt on the body – can’t be too careful – dirt caked under his fingernails, when it appears. It doesn’t attack him, just stands next to him, staring into the grave. It doesn’t really look like anything without someone’s will to give it form, but Dean thinks it looks sad.

“Sorry,” he tells it, and starts drizzling gasoline into the grave.

It doesn’t answer, unsurprisingly.

Dean pulls out his lighter and lights it, but hesitates before throwing it on the body. He looks at the thing, feels its awareness turning toward him.

For a moment, just a moment, he thinks, _I want_ –

– a desperate, aching thought, the lighter growing hot in his hand –

– sees the creature flicker, brown hair, soft smile –

– takes a sharp, shuddering breath, and tosses the lighter into the grave.

 _Dean hangs around in the parking lot for a while, longer than he can really justify, alternates between pacing back and forth and just standing, staring up at the sky. He wishes, suddenly and overwhelmingly, for a cigarette, for something to do with his hands. It’s stupid; he doesn’t even_ smoke.

 “Bobby, you heard from Dad? I haven’t heard from him in like two weeks.”

“No, kid, sorry.”

“Alright, thanks anyway. Bye.” Dean hangs up with a muffled curse, and sinks slowly down to sit on the bed.

He’s pretty sure he’s gonna have to get Sam.

Dean emphatically _does not want_ to get Sam. He doesn’t want to see Sam, have that chance of things getting somehow worse. More than that, he doesn’t want to upset Sam’s life. But Dad is _missing_ and he needs help.

He thinks wildly, crazily, _He’s gone, just like_ –

Dean flips his phone open again, one hand on the bed, fidgeting with the comforter. He dials Dad, listens to the phone ring with a sinking heart. He leaves a message, because when you go missing for weeks at a time, you don’t get to make the rules.

A few minutes later, Dean sighs and heads for the shower. He’s just stripped down and gotten in when he hears his phone ringing, and lunges for the room. He slips on the wet tile, and by the time he manages to reorient himself, his phone has gone silent.

Dripping, he sits on the bed and opens his phone.

It’s Dad. That’s the first thing that registers with him, relief sweeping through his whole body. It fades soon enough though, when he hears the message. It’s jumbled, fragmented by EMF, but what little Dean can make out doesn’t sound good. He catches “ – we’re all in danger” at the end of it, and lets himself fall back onto the bed, ignoring the damp spot his body is leaving.

That’s really it, then – Dad is missing, apparently they’re all in danger – and Dean can only assume that “we” includes Sam – and Dean has no idea what to do, except that he knows he needs Sammy for this one.

Dean huffs out a humorless laugh, rubs at his eyes. This can really only go badly.

_The sun is coming out more now, and the patch that Dean is in makes his fingers look bleached, glowing white. The light catches his ring for a second, and he winces at the spark of light it reflects back at him._

_“Okay,” he says aloud. “Okay.” He slides into the driver’s side, and turns on the car, takes a last look at the empty shotgun seat, and drives._


End file.
